I was so proud of myself I went out with my friends and paid for lunch. I think it was like $100 or something but at that point, I felt like I had made it.

It was $1.17 to be exact. Something I would not bat an eye lid over these days but back then it was like the whole world had suddenly come together and given me the result I desired so much.

About a year later, I hit my first $1,000 revenue day and a couple weeks after that, I hit over $10,000 in revenue in a single day!

The funny thing was, it didn’t feel as exciting as the first dollar I earned. I still went out on the weekend and bought myself whatever I wanted. I spent about $500 but that was it. I saved the rest. More testing money, I thought to myself.

So what made the difference in work ethic compared to the first year I was making a hundred or so a day to the day I made over $10,000?

Surprisingly, not much. I just happened to be doing the right thing at the right time. In saying that, I was working some long long hours launching campaigns like a mad man.

I was still pretty much doing the same thing.

Exploring the affiliate marketing terrain, reading success stories and articles and a very high focus on launching campaign. I didn’t care what I did in the day, as long as I launched a set number of campaigns and spent a set amount of money on testing, I felt like I accomplished more than most people.

Affiliate marketing is a big world. In this big world, we set out to find our fortune. Some of us give it an hour a day, (5 hours a week). Some of us give it 10 hours a day, (70 hours a week). If there’s a big gold nugget out there ready to be picked up by someone, who’s more likely to find it?

Let’s compare two more scenarios to make the point a little clearer.

Let’s also pretend we’re bird photographers that would get aid a million dollars if we were to spot and take a picture of a Double Headed Eagle. (Let’s pretend there’s only one of these in the world).

Scenario One,

You work 2 jobs, you have a family and you regularly go to boxing, swimming and chess classes. You don’t prioritize bird watching but you do it occasionaly just incase you get lucky. You know about the $1 million bounty. You’ve heard someone else take a picture and get it, so you want to do the same.

You’ve searched ebay for the best camera,paid $1,000 and every now and then you’ll do a round of your local park to see if you can find it. All up, you probably spend 3 hours a week doing this.

Scenario 2:

You’re not married, you have no debts and no commitments. You have one obsession in your life. To find this damn bird! It’s what you live and breathe for.

You don’t bother buying a $1,000 camera. Equipment is not as important as the result. You know that working hard is more important. Your smartphone is more than enough.

You wake up at 5am every morning, just as the sun is rising and set out to the most likely spot you think this bird is going to be in. You keep a spreadsheet of all the places you’ve visited. You’re analytical. You spend the next 14 hours till the sun comes down trying to find this bird. You eat dinner, call it a day and set out the next morning. You do this for 7 days a week. You can’t afford to miss the opportunity.

Who do you think has the best chance of finding the bird?

If you get paid $1M every time you spot it, who would spot it more frequently?

This is affiliate marketing. You’re setting out on an online quest, spending money, learning, being analytical and trying really really hard.

I was doing the above for months and finding small nuggets of gold. It was only a matter of time I found a monster campaign.

I didn’t do much of this in 2015 and thus, made a lot less than a year before.

The more you search, the more you’ll increase your chances of finding a unicorn, (or a double headed eagle). That’s the only philosophy you should go by.

I searched hard. High and low. Some days I found $1, some days, $1,000. Once in a while, $10,000. But I searched harder than 99% of people in the IM world. That’s all it came down to.

I hope you guys find your unicorns.

Mateen

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I remember the very first day I tried PPV, I found a profitable campaign. Does that mean I was good at it?

No way.

I had way more to learn about PPV and as I learned more I started to earn more.

Even with Teespring. I’ve learned tonnes more since I hit my 150k revenue month but that didn’t result in me earning more.

Getting good at affiliate marketing is a very subjective phrase. It means different things to different people.

As you start to become more and more experienced in this industry you realize it’s not enough to just ‘be good’ at this, you need to test and launch like crazy.

The more affiliates I talk to, the more I realize that whether their highly experienced or not, most of them are trying to find a new profitable campaign just like everyone else. The difference is, they’re trying a lot harder.

While the newbie affiliate is probably launching 1 or 2 campaigns a day, the experienced affiliate is launching sometimes 10-20 campaigns and angles, (some even more!).

The best way to get good at affiliate marketing fast, is to launch more campaigns!

Spend 4 hours a day and launch 10 campaigns every day for the next month. If you spend $30 per test and work every weekday, that would be about $6,000.

Quite a lot of money but you’ll recuperate most of that and if you find a profitable campaign in the 200 you just launched, then you might even be in profits!

If you do this for 2-3 months and find a monster campaign, then you’ll be able to do this every month.

You have to have money in this game. Money to test, money to by products, money to throw around intelligently to see where the gold is. This is another difference between experienced affiliates and newbies.

In most cases, experienced affiliates have, (or are willing to lose), more money. More money means they can follow the cycle above.

When I was making 10k+ revenue a day, I was spending about 5k+ on traffic for that campaign AND testing a lot more campaigns.

This is something you have to be relentless in. Test like crazy.

That’s the biggest difference you can make to your game.

The more you launch, the more you learn and the more chances of finding a profitable campaign you will have.

I’m going to follow my own words above and do a 30 day, (10 campaigns/angles) a day challenge.

It’s been a while since I’ve been in 6th gear, most of the time I’m cruising in third.

Guys, make 2016 different to everything else. Challenge yourself in every way. Don’t be afraid to fail and fail hard. Get embarrassed, lose money, (don’t lose too much, I don’t want anyone kicked out of their homes or anything :o), but seriously, make mistakes, they hurt but you learn!

One of my best friends has been a saver most of his life. He saves almost every penny and never tried to invest. I told him to buy some stock, it will open up a window to investment opportunities you never knew about before.

He did, after almost a year of convincing. Guess what? The investment is down more than 50% BUT he’s extreme attachment to money has decreased. He’s happy to part ways with it if it puts him in positions to learn and earn big. That’s the best thing that comes out of this, you stop thinking of money as such an important commodity and you start thinking about it like you would in a game.

Whatever you decide to do this year, do it big.

Mateen

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Anything of real value in this world can only be achieved through hard work and persistence.

Notice the ‘and’?

We all get our sudden rushes of motivation and can work a day or three at maximum capacity but when our minds give even the smallest hint of disinterest or results not going the way we thought, we start to give up.

2016 is going to be a whole different year. It’s time I, (and we), start achieving things.

I’m going to start doing 30 day challenges. Most will be business or work related but whatever they are, I’m going to commit doing things for a whole 30 days straight.

Many of us have read up on habits. They’re important because they make us consistently do the work or activities we need to. There have been studies that indicate it takes 21 days to form a habit. This number might be up or down a week but the bottom line is, it takes the mind a certain amount of time of doing something everyday to consider it a permanent addition to it’s routine.

Let’s compare 2 working scenarios,

Motivated: 12 Hour days for 1 Month straight. Most people stop here because they just get burnt out. There’s no way you can work this much in your own business especially online, for too long. 12 Hours a day for 1 month straight is 240 hours. We’re only considering week days.

Motivated but Smarter approach: 6 Hours a day for 3 months. Considering only week days, that’s approximately 360 hours of work.

As you can see, the second scenario will ultimately give you more progress and you’ll be at a comfortable working pace so you won’t be as burnt out. Most likely, you’ll be able to continue with it.

30 Day challenges don’t have to be extreme. The trick is to make them small but achievable. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself to the point that it’s too much of a lifestyle change.

It might be something as small as waking up at 6am everyday.

Or drinking at least 2 Litres of water a day everyday.

Or go for a morning jog for at least 20 minutes, everyday.

I’ve noticed a pattern in the things I’ve achieved compared to things I haven’t. The main ingredient is to be able to continue with it at a generally good and steady pace for a long while. I used to give things a maximum of 3 weeks till I expected results.

Now it’s more like 3 months. It takes time for us to get better at things. We might not notice but our body will continually improve at small increments as we do a certain something repetitively. The problem is that we expect results way to early.

My engineering degree took 4 years to get.

It took me 50 Teespring campaigns o find a single profitable one.

It’s taken me 6 months of boxing to learn the basics and even then there are holes everywhere in my technique but I’m definitely way better than when I started.

Two years into my work career and I was only just feeling comfortable with my role.

The point is, it takes a lot of time to get to a stage that’s ahead of most people. You’ve got to be willing to continue with something for at least a few months before you even analyse your progress or compare it to others.

I always find it interesting how much people achieve in AffPlaybook when there’s a 30 day challenge happening. Many find a profitable campaign or small business which they continue on for much more than the initial 30 days.

30 Day Challenges are to build consistency and that’s what we’re going to do next year.

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Some people say I’m a smart guy. I got a decent VCE score, got an engineering degree, found a graduate position at the largest construction company in Australia, so I kind of felt like I was.

On the other hand my family things I’m a little ditzy. I forget things and can be a little absent minded at times.

I felt like I was smart enough for business and that anyone of my friends that studied with me were smart enough for it too. It would annoy me that these people wouldn’t consider business with all their smarts. That’s until I realised the real meaning of being smart.

Being smart is relative. Business smarts is different to Street smarts which is different to being smart in school. Anyone can dig their head into a book for a few weeks and get a good exam score if they really wanted to. Being school smart helped me very little with my business. In fact, it kind of made the whole experience a little harder.

I was trained to be a perfectionist. To read read read until my approach was ready and perfect enough to be implemented. Business is kind of the other way around. You implement first, then you learn, then you read, then you implement, you learn, you read, you implement, etc. The action part comes first and failing 100 times in a row is totally normal.

I’ve learned to ditch my textbook approach of reading blogs, analysing, writing notes etc, and have focused on just doing. I don’t learn by reading anymore, I use it as inspiration and then put my money and time in action to see what results I get back. There’s no quicker way to learn then real life experience.

But for all this to work, the skill I’ve had to train into me the most is persistence. I was reading a quora question the other day and the question read something along the line of,

“What’s the most important skill or character trait to have in life”

The answerer had over 1,000 upvotes. You know what his answer was?

Persistence

“Persistence leads to Mastery” he wrote.

It made me stop reading and reflect on how true that was. We’re so caught up calling people geniuses and naturally talented, gifted by god or whatever but everyone that’s reached a position of admiration has done so with a gruelling work ethic. They’ve doubted themselves 1,000 times over but have conquered that self doubt every single time.

Whatever I do from now on I make an initial intention to keep going with it for 3 months or till I’ve attempted it enough times to make an informed decision about it.

With Teespring it was at least 50 Campaigns/Designs

With Kindle, it’s at least 10 books

With Gym, it’s at least 3 months

With boxing, it’s at least 3 months

Catch my drift?

No matter how enticing another idea will seem, force yourself to write it down somewhere and forget about it till you’ve finished with your initial project or commitment.

Most of the times we fail, it’s not that we’re not good enough or smart enough, it’s more because we don’t stick with it long enough. I feel that every one of my 20+ ventures I attempted before affiliate marketing, I could have been successful in if I just stuck with it.

Of course you need to be learning from your mistakes and switching things up. I’m not saying to do the same thing over and over and over again. But I AM saying to commit to one project until you’ve nutted out most of the process, to the point you can make an informed decision, whether you want to continue with this business model or not.

Just a thought

– Mateen

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I think almost everyone reaches a point throughout their career where they question if this is the best lifestyle choice they can possibly have. It happened to me fairly early. One year into my career and I was doubting the whole thing.

Two years in and I quit work to pursue entrepreneurship full-time. I had NO clue what I was in for but I knew I wanted to make this work. Sacrificing my work and career to make this happen was proof to me of how far I was willing to go to make this happen.

Transitioning to entrepreneurship let alone AM is usually a long windy path. It’s usually that way because we don’t give it the time it deserves.

Ask yourself this, if you gave your current full-time job 2 hours a day as opposed to a full-time 9-5 focus 5 days a week, how long would it have taken you to get to the level your at now?

you’re probably a pro at work which is great, but there were a lot of hours of work, blood, sweat and tears that were put in for you to get to that level. Why would it be any different for AM?

Affiliate marketing is no different. Think of it like a career. If you want to make it your dream, give it the focus it deserves. i know some affiliates that would come home after a 10 hour work shift and put in another 6 hours towards AM. It didn’t take them long to hit the numbers they wanted and quit work.

I understand that everyone’s situation is different but the reality is the same. You need to put in good quality, productive hours of hard labor to get this working. Below I’ll list down a bunch of changes I made that helped me become more productive with AM. Whether you’re doing it for 2 hours or full-time the below should help,

Eat Healthy

If you don’t eat healthy, start doing so. How are you going to find the focus and energy to work on something else once you’re done with work? I have 2-3 raw smoothies a day which amount to 1000-1500 calories of healthy fruits and veggies.

I bounce out of bed at 5:00am ready to go, focused on my work and with enough energy to last me the whole day. I used to take sleep breaks, now I don’t feel sleepy at all.

Sleep Early – Wake up Early

The morning is one of the most beautiful parts of the day. It’s quiet and there is nothing that can distract you. If you can get a good 2-3 hours of work in before the rest of the world wakes up, I can guarantee you they’ll be the most productive of your day.

NO SOCIAL MEDIA

Mark Zucherberg and his team are so damn good at distracting us that I’ve banned myself on checking FB during the day. The less distractions the better.

Immerse Yourself in Affiliate Knowledge

Long drive to work and back? Listen to AM podcasts/interviews on the way. Got some time to kill at work? Instead of going for a smoke break, open up Affiliate forums. I’m part of both Aff Playbook and STM and they’re both gold to me. Gold nuggets there are endless and 90% of my income was generated from ideas that were inspired by information in the forum.

Put Some Money In – See What Happens

A big part of the transition is to detach yourself from money. It’s hard to put your hard earned money in to something you’ve probably never made money in but at some stage throughout you’re journey you need to be able to leverage good quality traffic sources/tools/programs and general products that make your affiliate life more achievable. Set aside $10-$20 a day and put it in a traffic source. You learn quickest when your money is at stake.

Hopefully everyone reading this has a long time to live so at the end of the day you don’t HAVE to give it 8 hours a day but the reality is, if you want to make this an income source that can match or surpass your work income, you need to make it a top priority and not something you give an hour here and there to.